


Petrichor

by Goldmonger



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Romance, Sexual Content, Soulmates, forever and ever and always
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23605702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger
Summary: He first kisses her in the belly of Whitestone, covered in his own blood. Later, when she’s alone and knows she will stay that way, she’ll think how apt that was, a promise for their entire relationship.This,he was saying,is going to hurt.
Relationships: Keyleth/Vax'ildan (Critical Role)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 52





	Petrichor

**Author's Note:**

> 3 years, 115 episodes. I finally finished Vox Machina's whole story, and I cried my eyes out.
> 
> This is for the lovers.
> 
> *

He first kisses her in the belly of Whitestone, covered in his own blood. Later, when she’s alone and knows she will stay that way, she’ll think how apt that was, a promise for their entire relationship.

_This,_ he was saying, _is going to hurt_.

She hadn’t listened. She was too busy trying to hold on to him, leather that turned into feathers that turned into organic down, sleek and black and obscuring his entire body.

*

She puts her hand over the keloid scar on the back of his shoulder, fingertip to fingertip, like she’s checking the dimensions are right.

“I’m sorry.”

He pauses mid-thrust, hair tickling her neck. She can feel his warmth stir within her, and chews her lip, restraining a gasp.

“Keyleth…”

He makes as though to pull away, his expression just shadows in the gloom, but she holds her hand in place. He complies, hovers over her, just a jawline and a single, beetle-black eye.

“I just – I’m sorry.” She swallows. “I feel bad.”

“Nothing you do to me can ever be classified as bad.” He dips closer, sweeps his long, long hair out of the way so that they’re staring at one another. She reluctantly focuses through the haze of pleasure, steadying her breathing when he shifts and her groin clenches at the sudden jolt with an enthusiasm that’s almost painful. Looking at him properly, she can see the worry, the self-deprecation, and wants to smooth it away. She’s touching his scar though, her mark, and she doesn’t want to stop.

“You can’t say that.”

“I just did.” He smiles, so near, and she strains her neck to kiss him, to draw him down to her. It’s quiet for a while but for the squawks of Greyskull’s crows and the distant creaks of the castle settling. He’s so gentle, she thinks, as calm and careful as only an assassin can be. She waits to feel unnerved, but it’s drained out of her, expelled like her fear of the Conclave. There’s no more room left inside her for anything but him.

She climaxes with a pealing moan that he matches in harmony, and they stay connected, a completed circle, the musk of their sweat humidifying the room. Too soon he flops next to her on the bed with a sunny chuckle, and her hand follows as though attached, curling around him when he rolls to watch her.

“Just accept my apology,” she says. Her palm burns, and she knows it must twinge for him even worse.

“Okay,” he says, bringing his own hand up to brush her cheek, her throat, her sternum. Her navel tightens at every point of contact. “Anything you want, Kiki. Anything you want.”

She leaves her arm crooked over his waist so that she can keep her position long into sleep. She has touched him, she will always be touching him, and she knows it left a wound but she doesn’t care. It’s her mark, not the brand of The Clasp. Her mark on him forever, a tether between them, her guilty satisfaction.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes, into him, around him, and she is. But not enough to let go.

*

Vex’s head hits the stone floor with a crack. Keyleth thinks Percy hears it, by the colour that leaves his face with an abruptness that makes him sway, but she’s not sure of the others until the shouting starts.

The sound wrenches something within her. Like a joint, popping out of place.

“Take me instead,” Vax hurls at no-one, nothing. He offers himself like a clutch of jewels to a wily merchant hawking potions, a clean, quick barter that allows for no shortcuts, no haggled prices.

Of course, there won’t be, Keyleth thinks. Vex isn’t here to knock the cost down to something they can afford, after all.

When they stumble out of the tomb and into the lake he trails his sister, eyes dark, purposely avoiding the gazes of everyone else. His rage had been terrible, a fear that coalesced into violence that had nowhere to go, and as a result he looks worn. Expended.

_Take me instead._

The Raven bitch did, does, will. She has a desire, Keyleth will learn, that is as desperate and determined as her own.

_Take me instead._

How can she take something that has already been given away?

*

They’re burying Tiberius – temporarily, they’ll come back when the dragons are dead, she insists, they’ll come right back – when Vax’s hand envelops hers. He doesn’t say anything, waits on his knees beside her until her trembling subsides into nothing more than a product of the cold. His grip is warm and firm, and keeps her from floating away.

Both of them look at the snow, not the cadaver. She can’t stand seeing the scales, once fire-bright and glossy, kept vibrant in a prideful, sniffy way. They’re dull and chipped now, glazed with frost and blood that had been frozen so fast it charred. She’s so wrapped up in her own grief she doesn’t immediately see the slump of Vax’s shoulders, the loss like physical weight.

The slab is hauled over the paltry sarcophagus and Vox Machina stands around their first casualty, the ice numbing them, making them crystalline fixtures in the landscape. They could stand there for an eternity, until Exandria itself crumbled, an honour guard over the fallen. He was one of them, Keyleth thinks. He deserves better than a lonely grave.

When they return to Whitestone, it is frigid and dour, and they move around one another like skittish pups. Keyleth cannot explain the anguish that ripples out and separates them, sharper outside of Draconia than inside. She rebels against it, drags herself to Vax’s door, again. She continues to be the dust that gathers in front of him and scatters at the slightest movement.

He opens it, tentative, exhausted by grief like the rest of them, and he’s solid. He’s the rock her wave keeps crashing against, eroding slowly. He’s letting it happen.

There’s a hollow spot in the region of her heart that was reserved for Tiberius, and now it aches with absence, and if he can vacate it then any of them can, at any time. She has convinced herself that it’s something that will kill her, another death, but she knows not just any death. Not just anyone.

She cannot keep scattering. She cannot crash, and hope to avoid shrapnel forever.

Vax embraces her as they mourn and it’s odd – as he holds her the fear stretches her out, causes her to extend, to billow; his proximity loosens every bodily fibre until the feeling filters away and he replaces it. Vax in her blood. Vax in her lungs. Vax in the muscle fibres of her heart, stoically pumping.

She’s tired of being the barrier to her own happiness, and she can see he’s tired of it too. He is a raw nerve, open to her, he swore for as long as it took.

“We have nothing to lose,” she says, to sop up his tears, his bleeding, to make herself lighter.

She has everything to lose, she knows. They are entwined. She cannot deny that now.

*

_Here’s to a thousand years of you._

Cruelty is not in Vax’s nature. She reminds herself of this, swaddled in his cloak, his temporary protection.

It stings, anyway.

*

Vax drowns or is crushed by a tentacle or is sundered by teeth. What matters, in the end, is that he stops breathing.

Her scream becomes bubbles, resounds only inside her head. She is the spectator to a recurring nightmare, to the dread like tangible parasite that is consuming her brain by increments; her mother’s bones swirl into a maelstrom with Percy, Vex, Grog, but not him, please not him, this place cannot take anything more – she is the Voice of the Tempest, she commands the storms and sea, she can defy a simple, ravenous beast – 

It’s taking too long.

She runs, abandons her friends. He needs Vex so she needs Vex, drags them both to a temple, any temple. She cannot control herself. She begs. She prays for Pike like she’s never prayed to any god, even as a child.

The ritual is familiar. Her gorge rises, and that is familiar too.

_You’ve made a promise to me_ , she whispers, searing his flesh again, this time with sunlight. She wants to limn him in the gold of Sarenrae, the surety of the dawn. She wants to burn _her_ out of him entirely, knows that she has one ear cocked and listening, smug, derisive. The hatred curdles her words, halts them intermittently, but she can’t bring herself to curse the matron openly now. She must have him back, needs him for the life they are going to grow together. If _she_ comes as part of the deal, so be it. So be it.

Her handprint, her forever touch, glows. Grog knocks him further into her grip and she just rocks and cradles, fervent reassurances until his eyes open and the water no longer puddles, tinged red.

*

“Promise you’ll come back with me. No matter what.”

There’s dread seeping from his every pore. He swears to her his loyalty, but she recalls a tomb and what was sold there, and wonders endlessly how to wrest it all back.

_This is it,_ he keeps whispering to himself, tossing in his sleep. _This is it._

*

His armour is like the shed carapace of a long dead insect. It is a relic. It seems to moulder too, in her hands.

The thing that fills it reaches for her. It’s cold, angular; it is beautiful, in a way, would have been perfect as a statue were it not for the veins that pulse irregularly at its temple, skeins of amethyst and lapis lazuli animated through pale, pale stone. Were it not for its outstretched, empty embrace.

Vax finally touches her and the illusion fades. She feels small, vicious for her revulsion, and tries to compensate by smothering him, alternatively too little or too much. She fawns over his chest, the blooming stain that has crept like a fungus, the one he tries to hide, and dreams of clawing at it to scrape it off or dig it out. In the dreams, Vax’s heart comes with it, maggot-ridden and diseased black, and she wakes in hysterics, limbs curving around his too-still form like a cage.

It’s tempting, to stay like that. Her skin warms him, his lips, his blood, her scar on his curlicue spine.

Their time dwindles, as it is wont to do nowadays. She pictures them in nature, as ephemera born of the earth; they are both the final leaves on the most stubborn tree in the harshest winter, which is an illusion the hermit Sprigg dispels with a shrewd glance. The little gnome is a coward. He describes her as _love_ and her love as _sad_ and takes her hand like a baby bird in a gesture of comradeship, and it’s not enough to make her absolve him but it does break a dam, a seal.

Her firestorm rips through the clearing, clean through Sprigg’s cottage and his library of holy books, and Ioun’s champion is reborn in Scanlan’s smirk, his scathing, savouring shout – _betrothed?_

Vax holds her back, then just holds her.

She wonders if the Raven Queen would permit ceremonies of matrimony within her temple. It’s easy to imagine she would, with the dark sisters that petition her standing as witnesses, paying respects to her blessed chosen. Their friends could attend, too, not shunned in the fashion of the Lord and Lady of Whitestone, no, they would be in the most esteemed positions beside them. Percy on her left. Vex’ahlia on Vax’s right. She would wear her mantle and he his Ward, and she would kiss him to cheers, through the layer of other people’s blood.

She assumes that’s what it would take, for this to happen.

Vax, drenched, rises from a scarlet pool with a gem she can’t put on her finger and she tastes him vehemently, rage climbing up relief. His teeth cut her tongue.

*

“Did I frighten you?”

The question is whispered, barely a rustle in the ever-blowing breeze that washes gently through the Feywild like a cleansing flood. She props her head on her elbow, flat on the bed of leaves, and beckons him closer. Most of the others are sleeping, Scanlan out of sight but in earshot as he builds his doppelganger with lilting, sultry words. It adds to the music of the place, makes its unreality comfortable, like a half-remembered daydream.

“No.”

“Good.” He’s on his side, facing her, and nods downward in such a tormented and entirely Vax way that her reassurances catch in her throat. “That’s good.”

“You scare me when you talk, sometimes,” she says, soft, like the petals that drift in moonlight overhead. “The things you say.”

He’s staring again, carven, too white, so she reaches out and interrupts the façade. It’s easy, with him. He crumples to her touch like paper in a fire.

“I wanted to be of help. To be – useful. I don’t know.”

“I get that,” she says, and tugs on an errant braid, one his sister had woven unconsciously as they all sat around their earlier feast. He comes to her with her urging, rests only when their noses brush with their breath. “I get that better than anyone.”

“I know. I just –,”

“It hurts.” Even the words, laid so delicately between them. “Every time you die, a part of me goes with you. If you’re a revenant, then so am I.”

He wipes some of the shadows from under her eye, and the pad of his thumb presses there, like he can leave his fingerprint in the moisture if he’s patient enough. “Don’t say that.”

“You keep offering yourself up. You think I’m not on that gallows with you?”

He breathes once, ragged, like it has to be forced. Like he’s trying to keep himself base, and needful.

“You’re angry. I deserve that.”

“No,” she says. “You don’t.”

She can become flame incarnate, vengeful as a dragon. In her darkest moments, Vax’s chin on her shoulder with his thigh shelved under hers (so near, so permanent), she wants to storm the Divine Gate the way Raishan razed Pyrah. Let them try to take him away. She would burn this whole world to the ground before they took – and took – and took –

Faceless sun gods and feeble, arrogant scholars and a mistress cloaked in death. What were they but con artists wreathed in beautiful lies? A deviant like Vecna would suit their ranks.

“You deserve better.”

“I deserve you,” she says. “This – what’s happening now, the pain and destruction – I knew I’d see it, as a leader. I knew that hard choices would be a part of that responsibility. I just – I thought –,”

She doesn’t want to sound like a child, naïve, and simple. Growing up means growing through pain.

“I thought those choices would come later,” she says in a rush, tripping up, her and her damned speeches. “I thought I’d have more time.”

“You will,” he says, so solemn that she can’t stand it – she kisses away the despondence urgently, clutching at his rumpled front. His clavicle dips far, further than she knows it to go. His neck is hard muscle. His pulse plods.

“Time with you,” she clarifies, panting just a little. “Vax. You’re – you’re –,”

_I breathe you in. I’ll seize when she takes you. I’ll crack into halves, or maybe thousands, like something precious that’s dropped._

“I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to give you up without a fight.”

“You won’t be,” he says, smiling. He pulls her in, flush against his chest, against his impatient void. “We’re in for the fight of our lives tomorrow. That’s the battle, Keyleth. That’s what I need you to save your strength for.”

“Vax.”

The queen is inside him, her tendrils coiled around his limbs and nerves and rattled bones. She peeks out, in the spreading black of his once-brown eyes, the midnight of his hair and humour when they kill or banter or all lean in, huddled, because even Grog likes to be sure he’s still with them. She’s the spark of life in his disintegrated body. Within him she’s exquisite.

He hums, and it mingles briefly with Scanlan’s faint song. Her heart may be the one gushing red but it is riven too.

“Vax, I love you.” Their friends are deeply wrapped in sleep, and will not rouse.

“I love you.” It sounds trite, a token, a pebble to tumble off the landmass that hosts what she feels.

“I love you so much.”

It’s almost a sob. Almost. Vax is curled around her and he shudders like a ship in a hurricane, so maybe they make one whole, and when they rock as one they change the ebb of the tide and the beat of the wind with their vigour.

Or maybe they just sleep, joined together, mortally. Maybe they dream of the future, or the sifting, sinking past.

They are subject to destiny, after all, and destiny has a way of making itself manifest.

*

Green fire – and banishment – and – she reads, _powerfully, and strong_ , and –

My Vax’ildan.

“I’ll find you.”

“I’ll see you again.”

– snowdrops.

*

_Forever, and ever, and always._

The lie is sweet, sickeningly. She feeds the raven and tends the shrine and wanders her hand between her legs and all of it, every moment, hurts.

She waits. The seasons roll by, friends live and die and so do their children, their children’s children. Civilisations rise, fall, as do petty gods and ambitious mages. The Ashari flourish. Wars abound, and fizzle, and surge again amidst stolen artefacts, jilted lovers, broken treaties, tyrannical heirs. Adventurers speckle the land like flowers, dragons breed and are vanquished in an endless cycle, a rotating wheel.

The truth is sweet, deliciously. She feeds the raven and tends the shrine and wanders her hand between her legs and rejoices.


End file.
